Analyse two prescribed and related texts on how composers conform to the Revenge Tragedy genre to suit their context, purpose and style.

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Analyse two prescribed and related texts on how composers conform to the Revenge Tragedy genre to suit their context, purpose and style. In your answer draw on your knowledge of the conventions of the genre.

Certainly a genre is dynamic, fluid and subject to mutability over time. This is because it is adapted by composers to suit a particular context or cultural ideology or even the composers own ideology. Genre may also change owing to political, social and economic factors. The genre of revenge tragedy has continued to evolve over time because its theme of the universal timeless impulse of revenge strikes responsive chords in society at large thus composers have always been drawn to this genre. Indeed, Euripides' play 'Medea', 'Electra' by Sophocles, Mel Gibson's 'Braveheart' and Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean play 'The Revenger's Tragedy' are all texts that manage to adhere to the fundamental conventions of the genre yet manipulate and redefine some conventions to reflect their contextual perspective or give validity to their purpose.

Foremostly, the fundamental convention of the revenge tragedy genre is the thematic societal comment to criticise the deficiency of the justice system in ensuring legitimate redress which leads to social disorder. Tourneur's 'The Revenger's Tragedy' criticises the political and social contexts of Jacobean England by depicting the highest order (Duke who is the envoy of God) as lustfully corrupt. Significantly, Glorianna, the name of Vindice's dead betrothed, was a poetic nickname of Elizabeth I thus Tourneur reflects the Jacobean view where the succeeding court of James I was seen as endemically corrupt. Glorianna's physical dead presence casts a political shadow over the drama suggesting the impossibility of finding justice within the overtly corrupt social structures of the court. In the Greek play, 'Medea', it is the King who supports Medea's degradation exhibiting social...